Formally propose a transport-agnostic Cerberus

Author: mcy

RoT/Protocol/RFCs/0001-Transport_Agnosticism.md

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+* Name: Transport_Agnosticism
+* Date: 2021-04-02
+* Pull Request: [#16](https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Security/pull/16)
+
+# Objective
+
+Cerberus currently mandates that its messages be exchanged over an MCTP bus,
+using a Microsoft-specific PCI vendor ID. This is a limitation for deployments
+that might want to speak Cerberus over a completely different bus, such as
+SPI, I3C, exotic buses like NVME, or over plain old TCP or UDP for the
+purposes of conformance testing.
+
+This RFC describes a "transport agnostic" model for Cerberus with the following
+goals:
+- The existing MCTP binding of the protocol works with minimal (or no) changes.
+- Cerberus can be used over an arbitrary transport layer without directly
+  implementing special support for it in a generic Cerberus library.
+- References to MCTP in the Cerberus Challenge Protocol specification will be
+  moved to an appendix, describing it as a possible option for transporting
+  Cerberus.
+
+# Proposal
+
+"Transport agnostic" Cerberus specifies an *admissible transport* as any protocol
+or bus that satisfies a set of properties. These properties reflect the
+properties of MCTP already used by Cerberus.
+
+1. An admissible transport is a mechanism for sending a *message* (a dynamically-\
+   sized buffer of bytes) from one (not necessarily addressable) endpoint to
+   another. In other words, the admissible transport is responsible for removing
+   frames from packets and assembling them in sequence.
+
+2. Each endpoint has a known *maximum message length*, measured in bytes. The
+   transport is responsible for negotiating this parameter for each device a
+   Cerberus device intends to speak to. This parameter must be made available
+   to the Cerberus protocol but Cerberus itself does not negotiate it. This
+   parameter must be at least 64 bytes.
+
+3. Each message is either the request or response half of a Cerberus command, as
+   defined in the Challenge Protocol. To uniquely identify the type of an
+   incoming message, the binding of Cerberus to the admissible transport must
+   specify a *transport-specific header* that contains at a minimum the following
+   parameters. How they are encoded is irrelevant to Cerberus, beyond that they
+   be computable without receiving the entire incoming message:
+   - The command type byte (as specified in the Challenge Protocol).
+   - Whether this message is the request or response half of the command.
+   - Whether the payload is authenticated, i.e. whether the payload carried
+     wether the payload carried a MAC or was encrypted using a shared secret.
+   - The length of the incoming message, in bytes.
+   - Addressing information that determines which device sent the message
+     (the actual contents of this information is irrelevant to Cerberus).
+
+4. Messages are "addressed", in two respects:
+   a. A server can take a request and reply to the original sender with a
+      response, and a client can match up requests and their responses.
+   b. Cerberus can use addressing information of unspecified format to
+      construct requests to a specific device (this opaque addressing
+      information could be present in a PCD, for example).
+
+By construction, MCTP almost fulfills the above requirements: it provides framing
+of a message of arbitrary size, and the PCIe Vendor command provides a location
+for the transport-specific header. Note that Cerberus itself performs the
+size negotiation at the moment, so that would be moved out of the Challenge
+Protocol and into the transport layer.
+
+The above list is everything Cerberus needs: Cerberus can be spoken over any
+admissible transport with no change to the actual bytes present in the
+encoded messages.
+
+# Specification Changelist
+
+This RFC seeks the following changes to the Challenge Protocol spec:
+
+- Chapter 3 (Protocol and Hierarchy) should be replaced with the list of
+  requirements given above. We do not recommend using the above text
+  exactly; instead, the new Chapter 3 should carefully elaborate each point,
+  to make it possible for third parties to evaluate whether their chosen
+  transport layer is admissible.
+
+- The current contents of Chapter 3, which describes Cerberus-over-MCTP, should
+  be moved into an appendix, provided as an example admissible transport layer
+  for I2C connections. The same should be done for Section 8.1, which describes
+  a legacy protocol built on top of SMBus.
+
+- The first few sections of Chapter 6 should be modified to not reference MTCP,
+  and instead refer to the abstract Cerberus header (request bit, type, length)
+  derived from the transport-specific header.
+
+- The MCTP-specific errors in Section 6.5 should be removed. Failures such
+  during message assembly should be handled at the transport layer; the
+  transport should define an error-reporting mechanism for surfacing such errors
+  to a client. The nature of this mechanism is not relevant to Cerberus.
+
+- Mentions of MCTP in Section 6.7 should be removed. The maximum message/packet
+  size fields should be removed, since the transport layer should negotiate
+  these while establishing a session, and pass the maximum message size field
+  along to Cerberus.
+
+- The same should be done for Section 6.13.
+
+- The same should also be done for Section 6.18. Since the response makes
+  reference to payload sizes, we recommend that, instead of replying with
+  multiple messages of maximum size, we add a "continue" bit to the Get Log
+  response. When this bit is set, the client must send another request, with
+  the offset field increased by the length of the Get Log log contents field.
+
+- The same applies to Sections 6.20, 6.23, and 6.31.
+
+# Implementation Guidance
+
+Manticore currently implements the above proposal via the following procedure:
+1. Receive a vtable from the library user that provides a function for blocking
+   until a request arrives from somewhere.
+
+2. When that function returns, Manticore's machinery calls a different function
+   in the vtable for parsing the parts of the transport-specific header it needs
+   to select a message parser and handler (request bit and type byte).
+
+3. Manticore calls into the appropriate parser, which calls a third function in
+   the vtable that provides a `read(2)` interface over the message payload to
+   parse the message.
+
+4. Pass the parsed message into the appropriate request handler, which constructs
+   a response.
+
+5. Manticore then calls a fourth function in the vtable, passing along the type
+   of the response, that instructs the transport to prepare for a response. Note
+   that the original request contained addressing information that the vtable
+   tracks and re-uses for addressing the reply.
+
+6. The transport encodes a response header; Manticore's serializer calls into a
+   `write(2)` interface to encode the response. The transport may packetize
+   the response as its internal buffer fills up.
+
+7. Manticore calls the final, sixth function to flush the response, sending the
+   final packet.
+
+As the author understands it, this is somewhat close to how the Microsoft
+implementation handles messages, although it calls the MCTP library directly
+rather than virtually.
+
+Manticore's vtable interface can he found at
+https://github.com/lowRISC/manticore/blob/e7a532/src/net.rs#L126.
+
+# Future Work
+
+Transport security. This proposal does not cover removing the USB-C-based
+transport security from the Cerberus protocol, but we hope to give those
+details a similar treatment so that Cerberus can be spoken over transports
+which provide their own security such as TLS, QUIC, etc.